WebRender newsletter #38

Greetings! WebRender’s best and only newsletter is here. The number of blocker bugs is rapidly decreasing, thanks to the efforts of everyone involved (staff and volunteers alike). The project is in a good enough shape that some people are now moving on to other projects and we are starting to experiment with webrender on new hardware. WebRender is now enabled by default in Nightly for some subset of AMD GPUs on Windows and we are looking into Intel integrated GPUs as well. As usual we start with small subsets with the goal of gradually expanding in order to avoid running into an overwhelming amount of platform/configuration specific bugs at once.

Post navigation

10 thoughts on “WebRender newsletter #38”

i have a laptop that is always on it’s charging cable and even though i added gfx.webrender.all and set it to enabled i still get the message saying blocked env: Has battery I am using the latest stable build btw.

I have two questions :
1. Whats the next big thing the WR team will focus on? For example, for the first release, picture-caching was a big item to fix.
2. Do you plan to fix all fuzzing bugs before shipping? Recently, there doesnt seem to be much effort into fuzz testing.

Some of the bugs I have looked at recently were found by fuzzers, so there is at least some amount of effort there. I haven’t followed that closely, though.

About the next big thing, I think that a lot of effort will go into getting WebRender shipped on more platforms and configuration. Some platforms will require more work than others, but that’ll keep us busy for a bit I think.

Document splitting is still in the work and it’s in my opinion a pretty important change, so that would probably qualify as Next in the list of big things if support for more platforms isn’t what you are interested in. On top of document splitting, using direct composition, core animation and similar APIs to save a composition step (saving memory bandwidth and power usage) will hopefully be impactful too. There’s also a bunch of exciting plans around pathfinder and gfx-rs but that’s definitely not short term.

Pathfinder is a research project and research projects tend to get rewritten a bunch.
The new version (#3) of pathfinder reuses pathfinder’s font rendering approach for larger SVG drawings, using a tiling scheme for culling instead of using the hardware z-buffer with geometry like in the previous version. The hope is that this approach will be simpler and less sensible to floating point inaccuracies.
Hopefully this version is what will make its way into WebRender eventually.

Pathfinder is two things: a font render and a more general purpose vector graphics renderer. The current rewrite is only about the latter. FontKit is presumably how WebRender will interact with the font rendering part.

Development of WR has shifted from github to bugzilla. Which means all new bugs are filed, discussed, patches reviewed on bugzilla, and then landed on mozilla-central first. There is an automated bot (with some manual guidance) that posts patches from m-c to github.
So anyone who wants to follow WR development should now look at the Graphics:Webrender component of bugzilla.mozilla.org